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12 Sep 2011

How I chose what to study and at which uni, or 'The very very tricky part', part two.

Here, I need to take a moment to thank UCAS. Dear UCAS, you've made my life so much easier. French readers, you need to understand a thing: you know how APB is a website that's about saying where you want to study? Well, UCAS is too. And you know how APB is a total pain in the arse? Well, UCAS isn't. Isn't that just nice?! UCAS is well built, easy to use, all universities can be found on the website, it's nice to look at... I could go on for ages. UCAS is everything APB isn't. That is, among other things, a list of all universities and what courses they offer. It's like freaking Google for British unis!

I used it like I would use Google: I typed in what I was looking for (media degree in London-- not journalism or cinema or what, but media) and looked at universities that matched my research. I ordered prospectuses from all of them (five in total, I think), compared the content of the degrees they had, the location of the campuses, their ranking on the Guardian and Times rankings etc. I considered Oxbridge except that they didn't have a degree corresponding to my expectations, so that was it. I narrowed down the choice to three universities and decided to go and have a look at them. My dad and I went to London, went to an open day, attended campus visits, and I went home knowing which university I wanted to apply to!

But because I'm stupidly stupid and have a tendency to overthink every decision until I got bat-shit crazy, I kept on looking at unis, and found another one that I thought interesting: Goldsmiths. I was lucky enough to have a look at the buildings over the summer when I went to London on holidays. When my last year of high-school started, I had decided that was the place I wanted to go. So I applied. I won't go into details about the process, it's not that interesting. If anyone really wants to know more, leave a comment.